Skills Profile of UX/UI Designers

Nowadays, UX/UI design plays a prominent role in shaping companies’ strategy. It stimulates innovation activity, helps companies understand their customers better, and, as a result, creates a foundation for building better products. Nevertheless, it is still a challenge to define a skill profile of professionals working in UX/UI design due to several factors we have identified in the research – different design methodologies used by the companies, unique workflow for each company, and the critical importance of soft skills in a UX/UI designers skill set. The objective of the following thesis is to identify hard and soft skills that form a UX/UI designer skill profile that will be used as a foundation for digital training. Thus, a research goal was identified – define key soft and hard skills that are crucial in making an employment decision on hiring for each segment of employers. In order to reach the goal, the qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews with employers and professionals entering the field of UX/UI design, and then a questionnaire was used to validate a skill profile more accurately. As a result of the study, the hard skill profile was identified, a number of important soft skills were described, and expectations of UX/UI training were collected. Then, the list of recommendations for UX/UI design training was formed. The results will be used for building a more market-oriented training program.